Singularity adds export perm; Avination, Kitely to follow

The viewer — which is designed to work both in Second Life and in OpenSim — also added Server Side Baking and mesh uploads, among other improvements.

The server code needed for grids to be able to implement the new permissions isn’t quite ready yet, however.

Melanie Thielker

According to OpenSim core developer Melanie Thielker, who is also the owner of the Avination grid and CEO of 3D Hosting, there is still some debugging to be done on the server side.

“The viewer side is complete and works,” she told Hypergrid Business, “and the server side works 50 percent right now. We are working on hypergrid appearance, which is going to be yet another viewer update.”

Thielker is working with hypergrid inventor and UC Irvine professor Christa Lopes to finish up the functionality.

“Once export perm is complete and hypergrid appearance works in a way that gives a user experience that we can expose our users to, Avination will start hypergrid trials,” she said.

Avination is a closed commercial grid which currently does not allow hypergrid teleports in order to protect content. With the new “export” permission setting, however, creators will be able to specify individual items which will be allowed to leave the grid.

Two different types of hypergates on Festa 24H region of OSGrid allow travel to other grids. The one of the left is from The Hypergates network. Today, many popular commercial grids don’t allow hypergrid travel to keep content from going to other grids.

Another commercial grid looking at adding “export” permissions in order to allow hypergrid teleports is Kitely.

So far, however, Kitely and Avination are taking different approaches to this goal.

Currently, Kitely is implementing a system where content creators will be able to specify whether an item can be exported or not when they upload it to the Kitely Marketplace via Kitely’s new merchant web interface, due to go live in two weeks. The Marketplace itself is scheduled to open in June.

Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner

“Our marketplace content permissions system will keep track of all bought items to help reduce the number of potential exploits people can use to get items with permissions they shouldn’t have,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “This requires more information than just adding an Export flag to objects. Configuration of the Export permission on Kitely will be done via the Kitely Market merchant control panel.”

Tocher said that he hasn’t tested the latest release of Singularity yet.

“We’ll need to investigate whether the new Singularity feature can be made to work with our back end content protection mechanisms without forcing content creators to give up the flexibility of being able to set whatever permissions they wish to use on exportable items,” he said. “If it can be done then we might integrate it in the future.”

One of the major differences between the two approaches is that in the first case, creators can only mark items for export that are already full perm. Kitely, however, wants creators to be able to make “no copy” and “no transfer” items that can be carried to other grids.

“While people who export content to other grids may be able to technically ignore content permissions, the content provider shouldn’t be forced to either keep content unexportable or accept that others will be able to legally use exported content in any way they want,” he said. “Content creators should retain the legal tools available at their disposal — such as the DMCA — to help enforce their desired licenses. Kitely intends to provide the ability to define an Export permission without limiting content creators freedoms to sell items with whatever permissions they see fit.”

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China.

The Kitely Market merchant control panel has a web-based inventory
selection tool that enables changing what items are included in each
marketplace product variation (so unlike in SL, you don’t upload content
into the Marketplace via your viewer). The control panel also enables
configuring the Export permission for all the items that are included in
a product variation at any time, not just when the items the product
includes are “uploaded” from the merchant’s inventory.

The Kitely Market merchant control panel should be available for people to start
creating their stores within two weeks. The marketplace will open for business in June.